She looked up quickly, with the flash of some new thought shadowed on her white face.
“Why shouldn’t we?” she cried, half bitterly. “We have gone through enough for him!”
“And it’s all rottenness, anyway,” assuaged Durkin. “The Postal-Union directors themselves, who feed MacNutt and all his fry,—they make over four million a year out of their pool-room service! And one of them is a pillar of that church we passed, just above the Waldorf!”
“No, it’s not that,” she hesitated. She had long since grown afraid of that ancient sophistry.
“But why shouldn’t we?” he persisted.
“Then we might go away somewhere,” she was saying dreamily, “away to England, even! I wonder if you would like England? It always seems so much of yesterday there, to me. It’s always tomorrow over here. But at home everything doesn’t seem to live in the future, as we do now. I wonder if you would like England?”
“I’d like any place, where you were!”
“He’s always been a welcher with the people he uses. He will be a welcher with you—yes, and with me, some day, I suppose.”
She turned to Durkin with a sudden determination. “Would you risk it, with me?”
“I’d risk anything for you!” he said, taking her hand once more.